She’d been 100 percent on board with him helping April on the down low.
“Har,” he said. Just because he’d needed a little hand-holding from his sister with laundry meant nothing. He owned a washing machine and dryer, he just never had time to do his own.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know the difference between a load of colors and a load of whites, it’d just been a while since he’d had to deal with it. Back when he had dealt with it, he’d been younger, a grad student, and didn’t care if his black T-shirts got mixed with his whites. It just made gray.
“Have you given any more thought to moving to Denver?” Rachel prodded. She’d been on his case about it sinceshe’dmoved to Denver.
“Have you given any more thought to calling our parents?” he countered.
“No,” she said slowly. “Because when I call them, I start to question my life choices. But I like my life choices, so I don’t want to call them.”
“Fair enough.” He could relate to all of that. Their parents were…a little judgy. About all things, nothing specific. It was just their way.
“Haveyoucalled them?” she asked.
“Nope.” He shook his head even though she couldn’t see. “They also question my life choices. But I like my life choices, so I don’t want to call them.”
Rachel snickered.
“What’s up, Rach?” he asked, instead of answering her original question. The answer was the same as it always was: he lived in L.A. “I get the feeling you’re not just calling me about the laundry.”
“We want to take April out tonight,” Rachel said.
He grabbed a pink sock that somehow had made it in with the whites. Fuck. Lola was probably better with colors than he was.
“Okay, yes, take April out,” he said. “I’ll come too. Give me a chance to talk to her without…” He glanced around. This.
“Actually,” Rachel said in that tone of hers that he did not like one bit. “Can you watch her kids?”
He stilled. Spying a pair of blue panties in with the whites, he pulled them out. Definitely not white. Also, not something he should probably have his hands on. He put them with the pastels pile.
“Did I break your brain with my request?” Rachel asked.
“The kids? All of them?”
“Yes?”
Uh… Well, sure, hecould. He, however, figured that perhaps he should sort out what the hell to do with kids before being left totally alone with them.
“And, maybe, Simone and Yelena’s kids, too? So they can come along,” Rachel said, like it wasn’t a big deal.
“How many kids do they have?” he asked cautiously.
“Just the two.”
He wasn’t a mathematician, but that took the total up to five. Five small humans that he would be responsible for keeping alive.
“Um…” He wasprettysure he could do it.
He could always ask Kitty for help. But he was actually uncertain that they’d all be in one piece if he drafted her.
The little tickle in his gut was telling him he would be in way over his head. As Jack always tried to listen to his gut—
“Travis can come help, if you’re not sure,” Rachel added with a whole heaping of cheerful. Travis was his brother-in-law and actually had experience with children. “C’mon, big brother,” Rachel continued. “April hasn’t been out to a girls’ night with us in months. She needs this. We need this. And you owe me for all the ridiculous knock-knock jokes I had to listen to when we were teenagers.”
He had gone through a phase. He readily admitted that. He also had moved past that phase a couple of decades ago.
“That was a long time ago—”
